


Haze

by Bargain Brand (ConstanceComment)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dissociation, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 06:34:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21423775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/Bargain%20Brand
Summary: There’s a claw hammer that someone left laying around in the construction site, used to pry up nails or hang frames. Bones crack under metal and there’s a dull, muted groan. The smell of copper and iron rises, the sawdust soaking it up.Gabriel used to love cigars.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 18
Kudos: 59
Collections: Bloody 76 Week





	Haze

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Justice/Vengeance](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/534529) by Oricalcon. 

> This was written for Bloody 76 Week, inspired by [this beautiful art](https://twitter.com/oricalcon/status/1194291605710106628?s=21) drawn by [Oricalcon](https://twitter.com/Oricalcon)! It was done for the prompt Justice/Vengeance, though I screwed the pooch and am posting late.
> 
> Please take the tags seriously. Check the end notes if you want to see the spoiler versions of the content warnings.

Getting here took a while. A lot of leads were run down and turned out dry. It’s hard to walk with a burst eardrum, and it was hard to find a tactical visor that would connect to old military nanotechnology without both units frying. The soldier would’ve gotten here without any of that; weapons aren’t what makes a man dangerous, but they sure do help.

There’s a claw hammer that someone left laying around in the construction site, used to pry up nails or hang frames. Bones crack under metal and there’s a dull, muted groan. The smell of copper and iron rises, the sawdust soaking it up. 

Gabriel used to love cigars. In one night, the Program had made him hack out all the tar that had accumulated in his lungs over the course of a decade’s habit. Thick, awful globs of blood and old tissue, and black, putrid rot dripped from Gabe’s mouth into the bowl of a toilet in the public bathroom all the soldiers shared. Jack had sat there rubbing his back and made awful bargains with himself about how many times Gabriel would need to stop breathing before Jack would ignore his wishes and call the medics anyway. But in the morning Gabe was still alive, and the doctors put a camera down his throat and showed them both the pink, clean, healthy lungs of a man who’d never courted death.

“You buried the reports,” the soldier says. He wipes the hammer off with a rag that used to be a shirt half an hour ago, and sits down on a crate. “Systemic damage to load bearing pillars. Your silence wasn’t cheap. Who bought it?”

Jack had gotten Gabe a humidor for this thirtieth birthday. A cherrywood box with polished bronze corners, and little rubber tracks underneath so it wouldn’t slip off whatever desk Gabe chose to keep it on. They’d watched a village burn that week, ash and the falling snow indistinguishable from one another. Reinhardt had grimly tried to hide his tears behind his helmet, and Torbjörn had shouted at the bastard official who wouldn’t let them evacuate due to the risk of causing an avalanche further down the mountain and burying a dozen larger towns in snow.

‘There’s nothing in this,’ Gabe pouted.

‘Survive to next year,’ Jack said, ‘and I’ll buy you all the cancer you could ever want.’

“Please,” the inspector slurs around the stubs of broken teeth.

Torture doesn’t work. The soldier knows that. People who are tortured will say anything to make it stop. An arm and the part of a chair that it was strapped to break under the weight of a blow and there’s another scream, rawer this time. Names from a year ago, maybe closer to two, might prove elusive. That’s alright. He’s willing to look very hard.

“That’s not a name.”

The construction site is an empty part of Lucerne. A lot of old row houses here, sprawling open like broken ribcages, a few tarps and other scattered viscera blowing in the spring breeze, hiding the remnants of what used to be a life. The whole neighborhood is in the midst of redevelopment right now. There’s been vandalism and protests, but for the most part, no one poor enough to need to live here can afford to do so anymore. The streets are clear, and there’s no one in the buildings. The code inspector in the chair smells like blood, piss, and under that, fear. When he screams, the second nearest person who could hear is over a mile away.

The smell of home, for Jack, was the smell of smoke. The Program cranked his senses up to eleven and then snapped the lever off in the machine. Gabe’s jokes about salt as a spice stopped being funny and started being truth when Jack could tell where someone had been and what they’d been doing by the scent of their sweat. Gabriel, and everywhere he went, smelled like tobacco to Jack. Tobacco and other things that varied by the day; gunpowder, laundry detergent, gun oil, paper. For his forty-third birthday, Gabe had made Jack a tres leches cake he’d managed to disguise as a shitty, plain-white sheet cake like he got it from the fucking bodega down the block from their old apartment in LA. The cake was soft and mild, and Jack could taste the wax and the trace amounts of soot from the single red candle Gabe put on it, just like Jack could smell the cigarettes that clung to Gabe’s clothes, how he tried to cover the sweet taste of his own rotting flesh as it drifted into ash.

The claw of the hammer comes to rest right under an eye socket.

“A name.”

When the base fell on their heads, Jack and Gabe had been fighting. It was something stupid. Petty. Most of their fights were, small slights leading into fiercer arguments.

‘Let me in!’ Jack had shouted, dragging Gabriel backwards by the shoulder with a single gloved hand, desperate for Gabe to look at him. ‘I can’t help you dig if I don’t even know how many graves you need!’

Gabriel had snarled, a nasty, feral, desperate sound. Hands fisted in the lapels of the Strike Commander’s coat as he backed Jack into the wall, eyes wide and tired heavy with a weight Jack felt in his own shoulders.

‘I don’t need you butting in! I can handle myself!’

‘You don’t have to.’ Gloved hands on gloved hands, pressing forwards, pulling Gabriel closer. ‘You’re drowning, let me help you.’

‘I can’t,’ Gabriel said. Whispered, almost, harsh and awful on Jack’s ears. Gray wisps curled up from under the collar of his sweater. ‘I won’t. I can’t let them bury you for this, Jack. I won’t take you with me.’

His kisses tasted like blood and ashes, like the cheap cigarettes he’d started taking everywhere, ignoring the posted fine warnings that littered the base.

“Please,” someone sobs. “Don’t.”

Blood splashes warm and tacky on the soldier’s skin. The claw of the hammer sticks, and comes free with a wet pop and screams loud enough that the soldier’s headgear automatically muffles it after a split second of noise.

The hammer thuds into the sawdust covered floor. Useless. Time for a different tool.

Gabriel had pushed Jack out of the way. There must’ve been a split second where Jack had subconsciously tensed, somehow sensing the collapse the way he predicted seizures or earthquakes. He was still trying to identify the source of the threat when Gabriel shoved him down into a crash position, covering Jack’s body with his own.

The soldier brackets the inspector’s head with his hands, smearing blood and vitreous humor into his sweat-slick hair.

“It can get worse. What do you know?”

When Jack woke, everything was dark. He had been deafened, blinded. His whole body was a mass of pain. He tasted fire, decay, a heat that scorched his lungs.

He could still smell Gabriel, under the overwhelming terror of their burning home. Tobacco and rot but he couldn't hear a heartbeat— he’d been deafened—

Fumbling around in trial and error, Jack found Gabriel’s shoulders, realized the pressure on his chest was more than just someone’s body— Jack scrambled to reach, touch, to _move_ out from whatever it was that was pinning both himself _and_ Gabriel to the floor—

“Ffffick—” an awful, gasping wheeze splatters blood across the soldier’s face. “Fick dich!”

There was something pushing hard against Jack’s chest. His hands found it and followed the pain up from his chestplate. Found it punching _through_ the matching plates that should’ve protected Gabriel.

As Jack squirmed, struggling in vain to do something, _anything,_ the biotic canister on his chest was pierced by the weight of three corpses. His home, his husband, and the man the soldier used to be. Gabriel’s face painted in weak, golden light, wreathed by thick, black smoke. Panic, fear. An open mouth that took in no air and eyes that saw _nothing._

Pain in his hands. The soldier blinks. Fragments of bone and gore are lodged in the meat of his palms. Everything is tinted red in the visor’s field of view, splotches of blood obscuring it. He’s soaked, past his wrists, almost to his elbows. His shirt. There was a head between his hands a moment ago.

He’ll need to bury what’s left of the body. The whole site is open graves; foundations laid or soon to be laid. This won’t work forever, but it’ll cover his tracks long enough to leave the country.

Gabriel would’ve admonished him about this. It’s been almost thirty years since he was special forces, trained to resist and administer pain. He’s gained nothing from this. Gabriel would’ve teased him about impatience, about brutality.

‘One and done isn’t good for everybody, sweetheart,’ he would’ve said to Jack. ‘Leave this to the professionals.’

Or maybe Gabriel would’ve screamed about the hypocrisy of murdering in his name. Gone shaky with panicked adrenaline at the sight of gray matter embedded in the wounds in the soldier’s hands, complained about dire infection risks and how a healing factor couldn’t fix everything and: ‘I did this so you could keep your hands clean! Don’t let them bury you with me!’

Too late for that.

As he kicks a corpse and a hammer into the grave he’s made, the soldier calls a friend. A cheap, disposable phone.

“Sombra speaking,” the greeting is musical, and the voice on the phone is happy, pleased. “I didn’t expect to get a call from you so soon, old man! Did you miss me?”

The soldier huffs, wiping his hands on a rag that used to be the corpse’s shirt. “You still owe me a favor. He didn’t know anything.”

“Awww,” Sombra coos. “Sorry about that. How can I make it up to you?”

“There might’ve been surveillance. Wipe it.” 

There’s a _tch_ sound on the line. Sombra clicking her teeth, irritated. “Easy. But that’s messy of you, to take a man out somewhere prying eyes could see you. Exhibitionism isn’t very polite to your date. Did you at least take him home after?”

“I don’t think he’ll mind; I tucked him in. Let me know if you find any other leads.”

He hangs up, stowing the phone in an inner pocket of his jacket before getting bundled up in the cold. He’ll need to take the rest of the blood off at some other point, but at least the jacket is clean. From the same pocket, he removes a beaten pack of cigarettes. Cheap, paper and disposable. He cups the lighter in his torn up palms, and breathes deep.

He’ll need to be out of the country by dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: This fic contains serious gore, and a lot of dissociation. Jack takes a guy's eye out with a claw hammer and later crushes that same guy's head like a grape between his hands without realizing he's done so.


End file.
